


Continue to Continue

by boxoftheskyking



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M, Flashbacks, Good Sex, Growing Up, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Parenthood, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Shooting, Sometimes you live past 30 and that's okay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2020-02-27
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:41:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22919362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxoftheskyking/pseuds/boxoftheskyking
Summary: The thing is, if you manage to survive, that means eventually you have to live.Kaz and Inej over the years.
Relationships: Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa
Comments: 25
Kudos: 185





	Continue to Continue

**Author's Note:**

> Listen today I turned 30 and I'm feeling some Type of Way about it, so this happened.  
> I think that sometimes the things that are Self-Defining when you are 17 are just... not quite what you think they are.
> 
> The second part will come before too long, it's mostly written.
> 
> I pulled a title from that Simon and Garfunkel song because why not, it's in my head.

_FORWARD_

Nina doesn’t expect to arrive on deck first. She is, she supposes, essentially in Inej’s front parlor, but a quick look around only reveals Lisk, the quartermaster, napping next to the main mast.

She sees Inej out of the corner of her eye coming up the gangplank. Her brow is furrowed, her look far away, but her eyes brighten when she notices Nina and her basket.

“My Nina!” she cries and jumps into her arms. 

Nina catches her with one, squawking, “Watch the waffles!” with a burst of laughter. She sets Inej down and holds her at arms length, looking over her face and twisting a finger in the curl of her shorter hair.

“This is new,” she half-asks.

“What? Oh the hair. Few months, I think. I got half of it caught in a winch on a fishing boat off the Wandering Isle, thought I might as well chop the whole thing. Long story. Saints, Nina, it’s been too long.”

Nina takes a deep inhale, salt and smoke and rot and sugar—no matter how far she travels and how far she stays away, she’ll never forget the way Ketterdam smells in the morning.

Inej ducks into her cabin and comes back with two folding stools. The first few times she came back from months or years at sea, she’d celebrated with huge dinners at Wylan’s house, anything but fish and limes and hardtack, anything fresh and fried. If she happened to overlap with Nina on her trips home—because, for Inej at least, Ketterdam will always be home—then it was long, luxurious breakfasts in their favorite restaurants. But as time goes on, they treasure a simple picnic on deck, waiting for and beholden to no one.

“You seen Kaz yet?” Nina asks with a grin.

Inej looks like she might roll her eyes. “He was in when I got home last night. For about five minutes, then off to rendezvous with—whoever’s taken over the Black Tips. I didn’t wait up. Couldn’t have missed me already, not after a couple months. His new spider just about gave me a coronary climbing in the window, though.”

“Jealous?”

“Saints, no. I’m too old to sit in the shadows and watch Kaz _talk_ all damn night.”

“Yes, we’re positively ancient.” 

“You laugh, but he’s getting poetic in his old age. Last time I came along to the parley I just about ended it all with my snoring.”

Nina snorts and reaches into her basket, pulling out a small bottle of linberry liqueur. It’s been a few years since her last time in Fjerda, but she still has a taste for the slightly-too-tart drink.

“How was this season? Did you stay with the Grisha from the _Storm Runner_?”

Nina’s brow darkens. “Yes, most of the time. It was . . . It was rough, Inej, they’d been through a lot by the time you got to them. It’s not your fault—” But of course her face says she still believes every enslaved an indentured soul is a red mark against her own. “Let’s talk about pleasant things, this morning. Plenty of time to talk about the dark sides of the world when the sun is not quite so warm and the waffles are in short supply.”

Nina hands the bottle to Inej and pulls out two warm paper bags of sugared waffles. Inej’s eyes light up, takes a whiff, and suddenly slaps her hand over her mouth, listing severely to the side.

“Inej?”

Inej swallows with effort and pulls a face. “I think I’m sick. Must be these short trips—a few weeks on land, a few weeks at sea. Don’t think my stomach knows where I am these days.”

“Want me to settle it for you? Pity to let breakfast go to waste.”

It’s been almost ten years since Nina came to terms with her unusual power—years of hunting legends in the wilds of Ravka, trials and tests in the deepest mausoleums of the Shu Han, accepting the patchwork kefta created by her old mentors to honor her new hybrid existence. She’d never been able to explain it clearly to Inej, but a living body contains a percentage of dead cells that she can still manipulate. And she’s learned to see the cold absence of living tissue as negative space, like measuring a mountain by the stars it blocks out on the horizon.

Inej scoots her stool closer and Nina reaches out to her head and abdomen, sensing for the familiar shape of the living and the dead in a human body.

“Hang on what— What have you been eating?”

“Eating? Fish. Biscuits. I don’t know, nothing odd.”

“There’s something?” Nina cocks her head to the side and focuses beneath muscle and bone. It’s familiar, in an odd way, but she can’t place the odd feeling she’s coming up against. “I think you might be sick, there’s—”

She freezes and her eyes snap up to her friend’s, suddenly certain.

“Inej,” she says carefully.

“What?” Inej rubs a hand over her stomach, around her ribs. “What’s wrong?”

“I think there’s something . . . in there.”

“What?” 

“Maybe the start of something. I’ve only felt it a few times before. Inej, have you been bleeding normally?”

“I don’t—I mean it’s never really been regular for me. Some months it comes, some months it doesn’t.”

Nina bites her lip. “I don’t know if this is good news or bad news, so I’m not sure what my face should be doing.”  
“Nina, will you just tell me what’s going on.”

She grabs Inej’s hands and holds them in her lap. “Inej. If you want to, you’re going have a child. If you don’t want to, just say the word, I know the best people in town."

Inej blinks at her for a moment, looking down at their hands, then quickly pulls away and paces over to the rail. Nina winds her fingers in her skirt to keep from following. It’s a full minute before Inej turns back to her, one hand over her mouth.

“Inej?”

Inej bursts out laughing. Nina rises and reaches out for her. Inej drops her forehead down on Nina’s collarbone, giggling uncontrollably. Nina joins her, thinking back on the days when just a smile from Inej felt like the greatest haul in the world.

“I’m thirty-two years old,” Inej gasps. “Last week I hung a slaver up by his ankles and cut the tattoos from his shoulders and I sat down to a full dinner not half an hour later.. I’ve been mapping a trip—Saints, Nina! I was going to be here for a month and then gone for at least a year! I was going to the Southern Colonies!”

“You can. I mean, you can just take care of it and go, no problem.”

Inej looks at her and touches her cheek. “I know you’d take care of me. Thank you, sweet Nina. But I think—” she runs a hand over her abdomen. “I think I had a dream about this. Not, like, last night, not recently. But a few years ago, I remember waking up from this dream and it was so vivid, you know the kind. You wake up and your mouth is open, because you’re about to respond to someone in the dream. Or you wake up and your feet are on the ground because you’re on your way somewhere. I woke up, and I just knew, in my guts, I knew there was a child. And I looked over, and Kaz was still asleep. And I remember I thought, _oh, that’s okay. It’s okay_. And I thought it was so crazy, once I was fully awake. So crazy that I would think that, so insane that I’d think it was okay.” Nina watched her eyes as she refocused on the present, distant smile receding, becoming something tighter, more condensed, more real. “I’ve taken breaks before. The sea will still be there.”

Nina leans in and kisses her cheek. “I’m happy,” she whispers into the side of her head, pulling back to discreetly wipe her nose on a handkerchief. “Please let me be there when you tell him.”

Inej laughs and wraps Nina back up in her arms. “Never.”

“You have to. Godmother’s privilege.”

Inej says nothing, just keeps laughing.

_BACK_

The mountains that seem so unscalable at sixteen don’t get smaller as they age. It’s more that the context changes. How much is snow-covered mountain, how much is heavy grey sky. How much of the rugged, rocky trails twist upward at an angle that is so much gentler than you would expect until it’s under your feet.

The second time she comes home, she stays in the alley next to the Slat for a long time, looking up at the windows. It’s well past midnight, and Kaz’s light is on. He’d moved most of his work down to Per Haskell’s old office, but she knows he keeps his own books up in his room, unwilling to give up the privacy and uninterested in making the trip down three flights of stairs on sleepless nights.

She knows that he knows she’s back—even without the Wraith he has his ways of knowing everything that goes on in Ketterdam. Especially when it comes to her.

It’s not that they parted on bad terms, exactly. Just . . . frustrated. She’s torn between slipping into Wylan’s guest room—window always left unlocked so it’s ready for her, though she’s often reprimanded him about the risk. _You’re practically a mercher now, Wylan, you’ve got to act like it at least a little_ —and storming into the front door of the Slat and demanding to hash it out with Kaz once and for all.

Instead, she kicks a rock down the alleyway, and sighs at her own shyness. Not three weeks ago she’d slit a man’s throat, ear to ear, and tipped him over her shoulder and into the wake of the ship and slept like a baby afterwards. Steeling herself, she takes the familiar route up the side of the building and alights on his windowsill. It’s open, and she notices he’s set a mug of now cold coffee on a stack of papers that threaten to blow away in the autumn wind. She feels the weight of it—the mug, the adjustment—settle on her shoulders like a blanket.

She’s quiet enough that he doesn’t notice immediately, and he looks tired. As she watches, he shifts from resting one cheek on his fist to rubbing his thumb over his eyes. His bare knuckles leave a red mark on his cheekbone and it makes her smile.

“Long day?” she asks, barely loud enough to be heard.

He doesn’t startle, just looks up at her and lets half his mouth twist up in what could, in another world, on another day, be a boyish grin. The other half is pressed tight together, always in control.

“Just like any other,” he says, voice rougher than usual—another sign of exhaustion.

“Is it?” she asks, then looks down and occupies herself with climbing into the room. She’s not sure if it’s flirting or something else, but either way it feels like a weakness.

“No,” he says, and she freezes next to the desk. “Not just any day.”

She doesn’t know what to say, so she goes into his bedroom and splashes her face with the cold water in his washbasin. It feels like a little victory, one step into the neutral ground between them.

“How was—How’s the sea?” he asks. She looks over and sees him standing, hands tightening and loosening on the back of his chair. Also embarrassed.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” she says. “Not tonight.”

“Okay.”

She takes a breath, then perches on the edge of his bed. Another step, another yard surrendered. She leans down and pulls off her shoes, then curls her feet up beneath her. She’s been on this bed exactly once before, and hadn’t noticed how surprisingly soft the top blanket is. It’s probably just old, but she stretches out her toes and enjoys it, studiously not looking up at him.

The bed creaks as he settles down next to her. He’s in shirtsleeves, no gloves, and his socks don’t match. It’s close, but they’re slightly different shades of grey. She snorts out a laugh, then covers her mouth and starts giggling. 

In a second he’s standing again, heading back to the desk.

“No!” She jumps to her feet, wavers, and sits back down. “I’m sorry. I’m—I haven’t slept in . . . Come back. To bed.” She flinches; too forward. 

When he sits back down there’s blush around his collar. The silence hangs heavy for a moment.

“Do you want to—try?” she asks. 

He says nothing; when she looks over he’s chewing at his lip.

She sighs. “Am I doing all the work here?”

His eyes snap up to hers. “No. I— No.” 

She holds out her hand. He takes it, only flinching slightly.

“See, we’re good.”

He nods and smiles at her. 

At some point she thinks she had a vision of her life, falling in love. It wasn’t this, the flip of her stomach at one smile, and shivery risk of palm against palm.

He surprises her and lays down, pulling her to face him.

“Okay?”

She grins. “Good.”

He’s sweating, just slightly. She can see it at his temples, in the hollow of his throat. She’s captivated by it, right where the shirt buttons, that little bit of tender skin. 

“Can I—” she holds a finger up to it and feels him stiffen. He nods, though, and she delicately traces the line of his throat. When she looks up his eyes are closed, but he’s still breathing all right, so she runs her knuckle over his jaw and up over his cheek, his eyebrow, the side of his nose.

“Okay,” he whispers. 

She leans in, telegraphing it, letting her breathing come heavy and audible. He parts his lips and she touches them just lightly with her fingers, hardly any pressure. She feels like a pickpocket, replacing them with her mouth, like slipping out a wallet and replacing the weight in a moment. 

She should turn back. This is new, this is safe. But there’s a foreign taste, the feeling of _someone else_ against her, and it’s addicting, intoxicating. She presses forward, not demanding but—asking, with intent. For a brief, trembling moment, he’s pressing back, and he gives the tiniest sound in the back of his throat that sets all her nerve endings on fire.

_Those idiots at the Menagerie, all their extravagant pleasures. They’ll never know. There’s nothing more thrilling than this._

And then she moves his hand up to the side of her neck, encouraging, and he shoves away from her so hard she slides backwards off the edge of the bed. From where she’s inelegantly sprawled on the floor she can’t see him but she can hear his ragged breathing, the creak of the floorboards. When she climbs back up on the bed he’s leaned against the wall, one hand over his mouth and one tangled in his hair, eyes squeezed shut.

“Sorry,” she says.

He shakes his head, violently, then slumps and wraps his arms around himself.

“Why do you come back?” he asks, vicious. “What’s worth coming back for?”

“I miss Jesper and Wylan.” She can tell the joke doesn’t land the second it leaves her mouth. He won’t look at her. “Kaz, it’s okay.”

“There’s nothing here, Inej. There’s the monster, and the armor, and underneath it’s just empty. It’s nothing. Everything I've done, I've ended up empty. Just go.”

She shifts back against the pillows. “Come here.”

He scowls. “I’m serious. Get out of here. We tried it, it doesn’t work, just—”

“Sit down, Kaz.”

He glares for as long as he can hold his breath, but eventually he has to inhale and he does as she asks, sits perched on the edge of the bed like a bird about to take off.

“Sit by me.”

He frowns, but crawls awkwardly up to sit against the wall beside her.

“It’s going to happen. It’s already better.”

He shakes his head but she cuts him off before he can disagree. “You’re just too—Saints, Kaz, you’re not even twenty yet. You haven't ended up anywhere. Okay? We have time to figure it out.”

“You deserve more than this,” he says to his mismatched socks.

“You let me worry about what I deserve.”

“You’re—I mean it’s like you’re here—” he slides his finger across the blanket towards her, stopping just short of her knee. “And I’m stuck back—” he pulls it back in, pressing a frustrated fist into the mattress. “I want to give you things. I do, I really _want it._ ”

“Then you’ll do it. Look. Look at me.” 

He does, and it’s not awful. He’s red-faced, ashamed, angry, but the hunger is still there, the way his eyes flit over her whole face, wanting her.

“How do you climb an incinerator shaft?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“One hand.” She holds out hers, not a demand, just an opening. “One foot.”

He stares down at her fingers, finally a half a smile curling over his mouth. She reaches down and grabs his foot, safe under wool. She squeezes it, then shakes it. He huffs out a laugh.

She smiles, but it feels unfinished, unsatisfying. 

“Can you—” She takes a breath. This part she’s been practicing. “I need you to say something. True. I can wait for touch, that’s all fine. Honest. But I need you to tell me things. About how you feel. Oh, don’t make that face.”

If he wasn’t Kaz Brekker, Bastard of the Barrel, he’d look like a small child being forced to eat boiled sprouts.

“That’s what I want,” she says, shaking his foot again.

He nods, chews his lip, shifts around to face her.

“I— I am. Happy. When you’re on the ground.”

“What?”

“When you have ground underneath you.”

“I’m very rarely on the ground.”

He blows out a frustrated breath. “I mean when you’re not on the water. When you’re on land. Even when you’re not in Kerch, I like when I know you’re on land. Land that stays put, that can’t swallow you. Lose you. Just. I’m happy you have the ship—”

“You gave me the ship.”

“I know. I know, and it’s good, and you’re terrifying and it’s— It’s wonderful. But it’s better, for me, when you’re here.”

She grins at him. “I’m glad.”

He pulls a face at her. She scoots closer and lays her head on his shoulder. “I like being here.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think I’ll be at sea forever. I think someday—I don’t know. I’m happy, now. But I think someday I’ll be happy doing something else.”

“Okay.”

She closes her eyes and thinks about land, ground, solidity. Not a cage, just a shelter. A lock that she knows how to pick. A safe she can crack.

_FORWARD_

The medik’s test confirms, of course it does. Inej didn’t want to go, but Nina insists, doubting her own talents. It feels familiar, pacing in the alley next to the Slat, trying to think of excuses to put off this conversation. It’s not that she hasn’t thought about being a mother before. There was a period of time, about five years back, when she was preoccupied with it. Constantly thinking about the children she’d seen on the slavers’ ships, those that joined her crew, that joined the Dregs. The children they were, back at the start. How different it would have been for any of them if someone had just _been_ there. Someone good, someone safe. But she hadn’t wanted to give up the sea, and she also hadn’t wanted her life on the sea to be a home for a child. To do it alone. And, probably, she hadn’t thought Kaz could even entertain the conversation. 

In the end, she does it directly. She walks in the front door, walks into his office, kicks out Roeder with all the authority of a queen alighting on her own throne, and says it straight.

He says nothing, at first, but does put down his pen. She gives him a few long seconds, then realizes he’s waiting for something else, face carefully still.

“And I think I’d like to do it. Go through with it, I mean.”

He nods once, leans back in his chair. Looks at her for another long beat.

“You don’t have to. You know that—”

“Of course I know that, Kaz,” she snaps. “I know that better than you.”

“Fine, all right.”

“Does that mean you don’t— You wouldn’t want to. With me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Well fucking say something.”

He taps his fingers on the desk. “I don’t want to trap you here. In Ketterdam, in the Barrel. I never wanted to do that.”

“I know that, Kaz, that’s not what’s happening. You couldn’t trap me if you wanted to.”

“If you wanted—If _we_ wanted, we could still do it someday. It doesn’t have to be now.”

“It _is_ now.”

He nods again, rubs at his mouth, moves a couple pages around on the desk. “Okay then.”

“‘Okay then’?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Saints, Kaz, _something_.”

“You’re the one with faith, okay? If you say we can do this, well, then, you haven’t been wrong before. It’s been, what? Fifteen years now? I can learn, you know. If you’re right, you’re right.”

“But do you _want_ —”

“What is a child, anyway? A weakness. A crawling, shitting . . . _eating_ liability. Something to kidnap, something to kill, something to wake up in the middle of the night and walk in on it’s parents breaking some canal rat’s kneecaps, cutting out some skiv’s eyes. Someone who doesn’t know Thing One about surviving at all, much less surviving this city. Someone you’re—I don’t know, not supposed to swear around.”

Inej stares at him and then bursts out laughing. “Swearing, really? That makes the list?”

Kaz drops his forehead down into his hands. “Just give me a minute.”

She comes around the desk and perches in front of him, letting him lean his forehead into her side. She remembers times when she couldn’t let something as simple as this happen, or at least not with the door cracked the way it is now. The fear that someone would walk in, would question Kaz’s terrifying authority and her own fragile power by seeing anything soft. Or worse, that they would look at her the way men always did when she was swathed in silk and on display. They were idiots, as children. Talented, careful, brilliant, lucky idiots.

She rubs his back, down his spine. His jacket and waistcoat are off, and she can feel the scar through his shirt, just to the left of his spine, raised and puckered skin. She likes to cover it with her palm, like she’s holding him together.

“Ghezen’s sake, Inej,” he mutters.

She kisses the top of his head. “I know. We can make it more than that.”

“Than what?”

“All of that. More than a liability. More than a risk.”

He turns his head, leans his cheek against her stomach. “We can do whatever we want,” he says. He doesn’t sound convinced, but at least he says it.

“Whatever we want,” she repeats.

_BACK_

Inej pays no attention to the commotion at first. There’s always some kind of ruckus along West Stave, and from the doorway of Mendel’s Miliner’s Shop at the south end of the Lid, all she sees is a burst of foot traffic and a few frantic revelers, masks and cloaks askew. _Nothing like the old Khergud attack,_ she thinks to herself, chuckling a little. It still feels a bit odd to be buying things just because she wants them, because she has the money, but as she steps out into the spitting rain, she’s feeling overall very pleased with the new hat snug on her head,.

She’s planning to head up to the harbor to check in on the ship as she does every evening she’s docked in Ketterdam. She doesn’t get far before she hears a voice from above her. She’s just passing an alley, so she doubles back and peers up into the gloom.

It’s Ilse, the Dregs’ new Spider. Inej had had a hand in the girl’s training, but their styles could not be more different. Like a true spider, Ilse has always preferred crawling down the side of a building head first, all her weight on her comparatively large arms. Inej never asked, but she suspects the girl has an old injury to a leg or a foot—even in the early days, on a rooftop, a wire, the rigging of a ship, even sometimes across the floor of the Crow Club, her default position is hands down, face tilted creepily backward. It’s chilling to watch, which Inej suspects is one of the reasons Ilse has become Kaz’s favorite messenger.

“Wraith,” she hisses now from above, curled over a back doorway like a lizard. “You have to get home, _now!_ ”

“Home?” Inej, darts a look around before stepping into the alley. Two men run past, carrying a third between them, trailing blood from a wound in his thigh. “What’s happening, Ilse?

“You have to get to the Slat. There was a shooting. It’s Kaz.”

She feels like her insides have vanished.

“ _What’s_ Kaz?”

“They got Kaz. You have to come _home_.”

Ilse may be good, but Inej will always be faster. She keeps pace with the girl just long enough to ask, “Who was it? Who got him?”

“Don’t know,” she pants, skittering over the shingles behind her. “Just some man. Went into the House of Snow and opened fire, out of nowhere. Kaz was outside, on the street. Caught a couple bullets through the front window.”

That stops Inej in her tracks, about to leap the gap between two buildings. “Random? You mean it was random?”

“I don’t know. Looks like it.”

 _Fuck._ Her brain feels empty, slow, but her body has never needed much direction on the rooftops of Ketterdam. She leaves Ilse behind in the rain and flies back to the Barrel. Her new hat falls to the cobblestones far below _. Fuck. Fuck._ _Not this. Not like this._

They have him in his ground floor office. The old rickety cot in the back corner is the one concession for how bad his leg gets late at night.

Inej, who entered at his upstairs bedroom and leapt down the banisters in record time, tears in the room just as Anika is cutting his shirt away.

“Don’t touch him,” she yells, dropping to her knees next to the cot. “Anika, don’t—”

“I have to, Inej, just let me—”

The shirt is soaked, bright blood smeared over his shoulders and chest. Pim is pulling his pants off, and Inej can see blood on them, too. Kaz’s eyes are open but unfocused, there’s mud in his hair and on his face, and his breath is coming in tiny gasps.

“Where is it, where is he hit?”

Her hands are shaking too badly to do anything. They flap around him uselessly like drunken crows, settling on his cheek, his side, his knee. It’s against all her instincts to see him bare like this, to touch him, but he has no response.

“Back,” Anika says, propping him up on his side. “Two in the back.”

“Fuck.” It doesn’t feel natural dropping from between her lips, but she’s not thinking. “Where’s the medik?” She screams it over her shoulder, “Where is the fucking medik?”

“Pim. Go.” Anika commands, and he’s out the door like a shot. Inej can see a crowd of anxious, pale faces in the doorway, and she hates it, hates the idea of them seeing their boss like this.

“Rotty!” Anika yells. “Go to van Eck’s. Get Jesper. Now. Inej, keep him on his side, keep him like this.”

Inej can’t breathe. She holds onto his hip and his shoulder, and his head lolls down to the mattress. “Why Jesper?” she gasps out. “He’s not going to die. He can’t die.”

“Bullets are still in him,” Anika says, winding torn sheets around his chest and pressing them into his back. “Fabrikator can get them out.”

“ _Inej_.” 

She meets his eyes, and they’re focused, just a bit. There’s blood on his teeth.

“I’m here,” she says. “I’ve got you.”

“Keep him talking,” Anika says. “You useless skivs, get some clean water!” The mass of bodies around the doorway shifts and dissipates.

Inej realizes she’s crying, breaths coming in huge wet gasps. She feels like she’s been dragged behind a ship, dunked under wave after wave for miles with no relief.

“Kaz. Kaz, look at me.”

His eyes roll back in his head.

“No, _no, no, no_.” She slaps his cheek and after a moment he focuses again. She realizes vaguely that her voice is ripping out of her throat, higher than she’s ever heard it.

There has been a version of Inej that has existed ever since she was stolen from her parents as a child. She stands, silent and observant, five feet to the side of herself. She says little, does nothing, feels nothing, but she watches. This ghostly, silent Inej watched every transaction in the Menagerie, every kill in a shadowy back alley, every slaver bleeding out on the boards of their own ship. This Inej watches the blood advance along her arms, across her cheeks as she smears the saltwater out of her eyes. _Who is this?_ the ghost of her wonders. _This wailing woman?_

“Look at me, Kaz,” she begs. He focuses just past her shoulder. _Can he see her?_ she wonders, _The ghost of me?_

“Jordie,” he breathes, and she grabs him by the hair.

“No, no, my love. Not Jordie. Not Jordie, not now. It’s your Wraith, it’s Inej. You have to stay with me, okay? You can’t leave me.”

“Inej?” He seems to see her, finally, but then he screws his eyes shut and coughs, splattering blood over the mattress and her arm.

“Medik!” she screams over her shoulder. “Find a healer, find fucking _someone_!”

Nothing about her feels right, feels familiar. If she’s ever had anything, it’s control, but she left that splattered on the sill of his bedroom window when she crashed through ten minutes ago. Her ghost-self raises her eyebrows. _Two bullets, that’s all it took. After everything, that’s all it took._

Two years ago she’d taken a woman into her crew who’d escaped from a pleasure house on the Wandering Isle. A sweet natured middle-aged woman, quick to laugh, always ready with a joke. One night, gathered around a driftwood fire, she’d said to Inej, “I have to keep laughing, you see. Or one day I’ll start screaming and screaming, and I’ll never stop. I’ll scream the skin off my own bones, the lungs out of my own chest, and I’ll blow away in the wind, screaming forever.”

Inej meets Anika’s eyes over his shoulder. She looks like she’s been in a slaughterhouse, her arms and chest soaked, blood smeared up her neck. Inej knows she should ask, should wonder, _Are you hit? Was anyone else hurt?_ She should be the boss, tell her compatriot that she’s doing well, she’s doing all the right things. But she can’t. She’s not the Captain now, she’s a scared girl shattering apart.

Kaz jerks under her hands, and she holds him tighter, fingers digging deep enough to bruise. She desperately looks for something to say, something clever enough, wise enough. A proverb, a provocation that will make him wake up and fight back. But she is full of a hollowness, like a huge drum, her heart beating beating beating on it _not now not now not now—_

 _What did you expect?_ The girl in the corner asks. _Did you think you’d grow old together? He’d wait for you to quit sailing, set up a home. You watch him grow crows feet?_

And she did. However unlikely, fantastical it was, something in her always felt like he’d be there, they’d be there. After everything. She dreamed so many nights of Ketterdam burning, ashes piled to their knees, but they were always there, leaning on each other, scarred and charred and bleeding. _Knives out, guns blazing_ , the girl says, mocking, and it’s his voice.

“My— Inej,” he rasps out. She leans in so her face is inches away from him. Words are pouring out of her, only some in Kerch, every Suli endearment she can remember, pure nonsense.

He coughs again, more blood. He manages a breath and seems to come awake, to focus. She feels something against her forearm—his hand, unable to raise it farther than an inch or two. She presses his palm against her cheek.

“My darling Inej,” he says, a lopsided grin slipping over his lips and off again as he coughs. “Treasure of my—”

The next cough racks his whole body, rolling forward and back.

“Hold him!” Anika cries out, grabbing at him. He looks small under her muscled arms, like a child. “Don’t let him move with the bullets still in him.”

“Where is Jesper?” Inej mutters. “Come on, Kaz, just a bit longer.”

There’s a commotion in the doorway behind her. “Marilke,” Anika breathes in relief. “Thank Ghezen.”

One of Kaz’s best decisions of the past year was the recruitment of the house medik of one of the wealthiest families in Ketterdam. Ilse, proving her worth, heard that the Councilman’s family was set to move to the country due to his daughter’s ill health, but also that Marilke’s younger sister and her family were here in the Barrel. Beyond being a skilled medik, the woman is also one of the city’s few Kerch-born Grisha, a status reflected very subtly in the red scarf that weaves through her greying braids. Inej sends a prayer to every saint she’s ever heard of as the healer enters the room.

“Pressure?” Marilke asks, straddling Kaz’s limp body to take Anika’s place. Anika slides around her and down to the floor, leaning against the wall. 

“Did my best,” she says, exhausted.

“Through and through?”

“No, still in there.”

“Fuck.” Marilke says, checking Kaz’s pulse. “Weak. We need a fabrikator.”

“Got one coming.”

Inej wants to be part of the conversation, but she can’t look away from Kaz’s face. His skin is a sickly grey, eyelids fluttering. _This isn’t real._ This isn’t Kaz, lying still and unflinching as hand after bare hand grabs him, prods him, skitters over his skin like the claws of some undead thing. It can’t be him flopped on his side like a deboned fish, eyes flitting senselessly around at nothing. And this can’t be Inej, the rush in her ears, vision tunnelling out into panic. 

“Kaz, it’s okay,” she manages, but her voice is hollow, flat in her own ears. “The healer’s here, you’re going to be okay.” She rubs her running nose on her sleeve, smearing more of his blood across her face. She can taste it on her lips.

She pinches his cheek, hard. “Kaz, you have to stay awake.”

He opens his eyes, looking confused. “Where are we going?” he rasps out.

“Nowhere, Kaz, just stay with me.”

“What business?”

“Just breathe, my love, can you do that?”

He meets her eyes, and she thinks they might be clear.

“You’re crying,” he says.

“It’s okay.”

“No mourners.” It’s mumble, but she’d know the words in silence, the shape of them on his lips.

She’s about to reply when his eyes slide shut and his head flops forward, loose on his neck. The hand she’s holding goes completely limp.

“Kaz. Kaz!”

“Fuck, fuck,” Marilke mutters, working at something behind his back. “We need these bullets out _now._ ”

Anika lunges for the door, yelling for someone.

Marilke shouts after her. ‘We can’t wait any longer, get me some fucking tongs and the sharpest knife you have.”

Inej instinctively reaches for her boot, pulling Sankt Vladimir out, but fumbling the blade and dropping it to the floor. She can’t keep her hand still, her body under control. She manages to pass it to Marilke and is thankful she can’t see the medik cut into his skin.

She brings her unsteady fingers to his throat, but can’t feel his pulse.

“He’s not— He’s not—”

“I know,” the Grisha says through her teeth. “Let me fucking work.”

Jesper’s voice from outside is like music, like a blessing. He’s shouting, “Let me through! What the fuck? Let me _through_.”

When he comes into the room he freezes, nothing but shock on his face. “Oh, saints,” he breathes.

“Jesper,” Inej sobs out. “You have to— He’s— You have to—”

She doesn’t hear Marilke’s instructions to him, barely notices Jesper taking her place, focusing on Kaz’s limp body. All she can see is the slight gap between his lips where one bubble of blood formed. _Breathe_ , she prays. _Breathe, breathe, fuck you, breathe_. The bubble bursts.

“Careful!” Marilke snaps, and Inej looks up to see Jesper, sweating, hands outstretched. “One at a time. You have to bring them straight out, don’t nick anything else. Likely his lung’s collapsed.”

“I don’t know,” he grits out. “I don’t know what’s in there, I don’t know where—”

“Shut up and focus, boy! You, girl, hold him steady.”

 _I’m not a girl_ , the ghost of her says from five feet away. _I’m twenty. I’m not a girl anymore_ . She repeats it over and over, trying to drown out the rest of her brain. _He’s not moving,_ she wants to scream in reply. _He’s dead. He’s dead._ But, girl or not, she follows orders.

“I don’t know if it’s right,” Jesper gasps out, tension in every line of his face, his neck. “I can’t fuck this up, I can’t—”

“Just feel for it, you can do it.”

Inej can hear a sickening squelch, and Jesper suddenly drops his hands, sucking in air like a drowning man.

“Get the other,” Marilke commands. “Quickly now.”

Jesper flexes his fingers, then focuses again. This time seems faster—either he’s more confident, or this bullet is less deep. Marilke is turning the first bullet over in her fingers.

“Good,” she says. “It’s whole. Don’t have to go digging for shards.”

Inej hears the second bullet tear free from Kaz’s flesh, and Marilke unceremoniously shoves Jesper off the cot.

Her posture is the opposite to his, all confidence and ease, as she raises her hands above him.

“What are you doing?” Inej asks.

“I can explain it to you or I can fucking do it.”

Cowed, Inej reaches a hand out to Jesper. He takes it, slumping forward.

“You did it,” she says softly, not looking away from Kaz’s face.

“We’ll see,” he says. “What the fuck happened? Who got to him?”

“No one. It was random. Bystander.”

“ _What?_ Kaz hasn’t been a bystander a day in his life.”

Inej presses her mouth to Kaz’s knuckles. _Sankta Alina_ , she mouths against his skin, _Sankt Petyr. Marya, Anastasia. Please, please, please._ A minute passes, then ten, then more. She counts the beats of her own heart, one prayer for each.

Finally, with a wheeze like an old bellows, Kaz takes a breath.

“Oh!” Inej gasps, dropping Jesper’s hand and grabbing at Kaz’s jaw.

Marilke sits back and wipes her brow. “Got him breathing, at least. Now it’s getting through the night. Materialnik, get up here.”

She manhandles Jesper into place behind Kaz, gently shifting his limp body backward on the cot. The mattress beneath him is soaked through with blood, drying at the edges into an earthy brown. 

“You, girl, hold him from this side. Don’t let him turn, you keep him on his side like this. He needs to stay still through the night so everything stays in its proper place. That’s organ work I had to do, it’s delicate.”

Inej pulls herself up onto the cot, stretching out alongside him. It occurs to her that she’s never been this close to him in a bed, certainly never when he’s in nothing but undergarments and passed out cold.

“Never expected to end up here,” Jesper says, not quite a joke. He’s holding himself a few inches away from touching Kaz’s skin, free hand hovering over his shoulder.

“For the love of Ghezen,” Marilke grumbles, and she reaches over all of them to shove Jesper tight against Kaz’s back, tugging his arm down to rest against his chest. “I said _hold him._ ”

Inej curls closer, knees against Kaz’s thighs, pressing them back against Jesper.

“Fuck, I need a drink,” Marilke says. She turns and yells out the door, “Someone get me some clearn fucking water.”

“Do you think she talked like that in Councilman Osgaard’s house?” Jesper mutters.

“You two just . . . stay there. Can you do that?” She looks down her nose at them as though she highly doubts it.

“Yes,” Jesper says, and it sounds like something solemn, something you swear to.

Marilke holds her hands over Kaz’s neck for a moment, then rises and stretches. “If he comes to, that should help with the pain at least a little. If he doesn’t come to, well, at least he won’t feel it.” She shuts the door behind her, and the room seems to shrink.

Inej looks into Jesper’s grey eyes over Kaz’s shoulder and reaches across to twist her fingers into his bloody shirt.

“What the fuck?” he says.

“You did it,” she whispers. Her throat is sore, but she doesn’t remember what from. 

“Yeah.” He closes his eyes and timidly leans forward, resting his forehead against Kaz’s hair.

“What do we do now?” Inej asks.

She can see Jesper’s long breath through Kaz’s hair. “We make him come back.”

“To life?”

“Yeah.”

She feels guilty, like she should cover him, run upstairs and find his gloves. But as time ticks on she relaxes, reaches up to rest a hand against his cheek, running her fingertips along his jaw. If anything, he might wake up to tell her to back off. She thinks Jesper might doze for a while, his long brown fingers pressed against the ghostly white of Kaz’s sternum.

She can’t tell what time it is, but through the closed door the Slat sounds oddly hushed.

“Do you think someone’s going to try something?” she asks Jesper.

“Hmm?” he blinks awake. “Try what?”

“He’s weak. If it were Kaz, now’s when he’d make a move.”

“Who would dare?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been back that long. I don’t— He doesn’t tell me everything.” The ‘anymore’ is unspoken.

Jesper shrugs. “I don’t know. But I think, despite his best efforts, people actually like the fucker.”

They drift, silently counting the beats of his heart.

“I don’t know how to think about someone just— It being random," she says after a long time.

“Was it, really?”

“That’s what they’re saying. Some man went on a rampage in a pleasure house and Kaz caught it through the front window.”

Jesper shakes his head. “That’s why he can’t die. Too many people have too many reasons to want him dead. It can’t happen like this.”

“Or this is exactly what he’d do. Get the last laugh.”

Jesper’s eyes flash, his voice hard. “Don’t say that.”

She closes her eyes. “I didn’t mean it.”

“Pray to your saints. Take it back.”

“I take it back.”

She lays there, silent, feeling the quiet between them shift from angry to tense to tired to exhausted. She reaches for Jesper’s hand, twining their fingers together over Kaz’s chest.

“I’ve never lost it like that before,” she confesses after a long time.

“Like what?”

She shakes her head. “Never mind.”

Kaz coughs, once, shallow, and they freeze.

“Kaz?” she whispers, barely a breath.

He opens his eyes, furrows his brow, coughs again.

“Water. Shit.” It feels like tearing out her insides, but she pulls away and grabs the lukewarm pitcher from the desk, splashing it into a cup and over half the papers. _He’d better be able to complain about that_ , she thinks.

When she returns to the cot, Kaz is holding Jesper’s hand up to his face, eyes unfocused and glassy. Jesper isn’t breathing, looking like someone with one hand in an open safe when the lights come on and the master comes home.

“Jes?” Kaz says. She expects it to be rougher than ever, but it’s cotton-soft, breathy. It feels ridiculous, but Inej thinks she might cry.

“Yeah?” Jesper answers cautiously.

Kaz coughs again. “How— How did you die?”

“I—” Jesper startles, then grins, relief in his voice. “How did I die? I touched the skin of Dirtyhands, and I exploded.”

Kaz closes his eyes and drops Jesper’s hand. “Huh,” he says.

“Worth it, though,” Jesper says. There's a tremble to his voice, to the way he looks down at the side of Kaz's face. A kind of devotion she feels guilty for watching.

Inej perches on the edge of the cot and takes Kaz under the chin. “Here, try to drink some water.”

He rolls his eyes sideways to look at her, lids narrowed and grumpy like a child woken for school. She can’t help it, she starts laughing, hands shaking, spilling water onto his neck.

“Hey,” he mutters. 

She gets his head slightly lifted and he manages a sip before breaking down into coughing. She smooths his hair back from his head and shushes him like she does the young captives who wake screaming in the dark belly of the _Wraith_. “You’re all right, my love. You’ll be all right.”

He smiles up at her, eyes closed, almost sweet. “Will you say ‘my love’ when I wake up?” he murmurs.

“Of course.”

He hums and sinks back into sleep. She keeps running her fingers through his muddy hair.

“What now?” Jesper whispers. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know,” she says. She curls back around him, one hand fitting to the back of Jesper’s neck, thumb soothing back and forth over his skin. She touches her nose to the delicate skin of Kaz’s neck, where she can feel his heart beating. “Just stay here,” she whispers, to both of them, to herself. The other girl, the ghost, is gone. “Stay here.”


End file.
